Microsoft has been pretty stingy about revealing sales numbers for its Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets, but the Windows maker finally threw a number out there -- just one.

From the launch of the Surface RT tablet (October 26, 2012) and the launch of the Surface Pro tablet (February 9, 2013) until the end of the company's fiscal year on June 30, Microsoft said Surface tablet sales came out to a total of $853 million USD.

Microsoft failed to mention which portion of those sales were Surface RT sales and which were Surface Pros.

In an 8-month period, Microsoft sold 1.7 million Surface tablets -- which doesn't look too good sitting next to Apple's numbers. Last November, Apple sold 3 million iPads in just three days around the holiday shopping period.

In addition, Apple sold 14.6 million iPads in the last quarter alone, and a total of 57 million iPads since the launch of the Surface RT in October.

Last month, Microsoft was basically giving Surface RTs away. It announced that it was giving away 10,000 Surface RT tablets to teachers at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). The idea was to spread RT adoption in schools by supplying teachers with the devices and even training them how to use it.

Days later, Microsoft introduced the "Microsoft Surface for education limited time offer," which will give discounted Surface RTs to schools and colleges interested in adopting the tablets.

The offer, which will reportedly run until August 31, 2013, will sell Surface RTs (without keyboards) to schools for only $199. If the schools want a touch keyboard with their Surface RT, the total price is $249. With a type keyboard, the cost is $289.

For the fiscal year ended June 30, analysts had hoped for earnings of around 75 cents per share ($6.33 billion USD) on revenue of $20.73 billion USD (not including the Surface write-down). Instead they got earnings of around 66 cents per share ($5.56 billion USD) once the Surface write-down was removed.

Modern works great in touchscreen setup, and there is a benefit of being able to run legacy apps, if one needs to. My wife is working in Uni and she found it really nice being able to do some light reading and reviewing of her student's assignments and other papers on tablet, without worrying re compatibility and formating. And I love being able to easily access my home network shares, pull a book, comics or video file from server as simple as I would from my notebook, without extra weight.

In addition, I still stumble upon web sites that will not render correctly on Android or iPad - problem I haven't experienced on Atom tablets.

Problem with Windows tablets, to my opinion, is that they are, at present, too expensive for what they are. They should have price comparative to Atom based netbooks - this is hardware we are talking about, more or less. But while netbooks were available for less than NZ$400, cheapest Atom tablet in NZ (Asus VivoTab Smart) retails for around NZ$650. Better ones, like ThinkPad Tablet 2, are in vicinity of NZ$1000 - you can get decent i5 laptop for that money. This is just not reasonable.

Second problem is, obviously, being late to the party. Android tablets are only catching up, and how long are they around already? But that, in my book, is reason more for Win tablet OEMs to go in as cheap as possible, rather than trying to milk market segment that almost does not exist yet (as in Windows 8 market segment).